Research Guides: Library and Information Science: Statistics

Library Statistical Sources

American Library Association (ALA) Library Statistics
Offers statistics organized by library type: international libraries, US libraries, academic libraries, public libraries, etc. Includes statistics such as circulation numbers, gate counts, reference questions, and more.
Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Data & Analytics
Created with the goal to convey the value of research libraries, ARL statistics offers assessment statistics and tools to evaluate the effects of libraries as well as historical statistics on trends in services and collections.
Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Research and Evaluation
IMLS is the main source of federal funding for US libraries and conducts multiple surveys such as the Public Libraries in the United States Survey, State Library Agency Survey, and the Museums Count collections
Library Research Service
The LRS conducts research about libraries and offers fast and "quotable" facts and statistics. They also offer more in depth analysis and explanations of research methods
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES): Library Statistics Program
The NCES conducts an annual survey on academic libraries.
OCLC Research
OCLC conducts research on library usage, WorldCat, and the challenges libraries face. Their website offers data, research methods, and user studies focused on librarianship.
Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)
From NCES, this program includes adult literacy statistics.

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) This link opens in a new window
Statistics and data from the federal government on education in the United States.

Pew Research Center: Libraries
Covers a variety of topics related to libraries including readership and usage.

Finding Stats in Government Sources

Many government websites and publications include statistics; however, government websites can sometimes be frustrating to use and often it's easier to find statistics in government sources by using a search engine such as Google. Along with words to describe your topic, use these tricks to find statistics in government sources via Google:

Limit by URL Domain: site:gov

This limits your search to websites that end in "gov," which are typically U.S. (federal, state, and city) government websites.

Limit by Filetype: filetype:pdf

This limits your search to PDFs. Many government publications are in PDF format. Other filetypes such as .ppt (PowerPoints), .xls (Excel), and .doc (Word documents) work as well.

Add the word statistics to your search.

Example Searches

site:gov filetype:pdf education statistics
site:gov homeless Colorado statistics

Readers

Source: Pew Research Center, Who doesn’t read books in America?, March 23, 2018